Can we edit terrain at runtime?
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i’m not gonna get in trouble if i post a video someone uploaded will i?
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Unreal’s PCG seems pretty cool and conceptually you can do similar things in this new World building system, but ours is currently driven by layers and masks, not a graph.
We felt that would be more accessible to more users.
You can use Shader Graph in certain areas if you want to define some custom logic.
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Foundationally, we are preparing for runtime modifiable terrain surface, but there is a lot of pieces that need to work together to get this right.
For example, lighting, physics and scattered objects all need to be able to compensate for a modified terrain. Not all of that may arrive at the same time once this gets released.
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@Wolfos we’d like this new system to also work work with GameObject physics and not only DOTS physics.
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@IllTemperedTunas regarding the Paint system used by this new terrain system, it is on track to your wishes (it is a separate, universal paint package not exclusive for terrain editing, although our initial focus is to make sure it works very well for terrain painting)
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Holy sh*t. I’m so friggin’ happy to hear that, so glad to hear you guys are thinking of the bigger picture!
This might sound silly, but this little bit of news has me excited more than anything else. This really shows you guys aren’t just checking things off the list, you’re thinking holistically about the tools in the larger ecosystem of gamedev, this is so reassuring. 
Looking forward to seeing how this shapes up over the years!
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Thanks for your thoughts.
I am not sure what “deferred virtual terrain rendering” is exactly but this system uses virtual texturing and dynamic tessellation to render the base surface
Shader Graph is fully supported. Both to modify the rendering of the terrain surface as well as nodes to blend custom meshes with the terrain surface.
Our scattering needs some more work. But scattering different vegetation at different ranges etc is already possible. We can hopefully show more on scattering in a future update.
For decals, we currently support using default Unity decals on the terrain. I’m hoping we can do something cooler here in the future.
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This is a new system, completely replacing the Terrain system.
We are still working on the scattering system, but our goals are yes that you can have different scatter behaviour based on what is happening in that area of the world. This would be setup by various masks that feed into the layer stack that scattering responds too.
Scattering things on top of other meshes (such as mosses on top of scattered rocks) is something we still need to work on, but it is being considered.
First thing we wanted to make sure is that you can successfully import scattered data from external apps like Houdini. Then proceed to adding more functionality to do it all inside of Unity.
New system is stamps, masks and point clouds brought together in a Layer Stack.
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This sounds great. As a Houdini user, it would be wonderful to see continued improvements in integration between the tools. Also, Unity has been left behind in the tutorial world (including on the SideFX website) in favor of Unreal. It would be helpful if you could collaborate with SideFX to do some more Unity/Houdini tutorials.
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Will the water system be updated with the new terrain system?
- Terrain can directly edit the Water Current Map?
- Water system converted to ECS?
@astral_stargazer0 agreed. Currently have a few technical artists in our team that use Houdini (and other tools) to export and import the data between the two, and some documentation on this should be provided during release. 
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The new water system was originally developed by the same team that is now working on the new world building tools. (In collaboration with GFX team)
Our goal was to be able to have some of the data that drives the water system (like Flow) be represented in the Layer Stack that is used to create the world surface.
It was decided to release the water system early so we’ll have to figure out how to create a good connection / workflow between the two.
Would be very useful / powerful if the landscape and water / rivers can be authored together.
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It’s nice to hear that the same team is working on the new terrain system.
Runtime effects such as changing current, deformation, buoyancy for physics entities and other tricks would be a lot easier and more performant if the water system was upgraded to ECS.
I feel that the integration of Splines into both systems would be pretty powerful. Maybe not for V1, but using a Spline to dig out a river trench, and also drive flow of the water system, seems fairly intuitive from a user standpoint.
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Absolutely. We have done quite a bit of experimentation with using splines for all kinds of things from roads to rivers or just masking areas. I am not sure we’ll get it in a releasable state for the first version, because there is still much to do, but certainly we want it! 
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It’s exciting! But also I think it’s really good that the focus is on getting to a stable baseline version to have parity with what’s already in the engine, and then expand on it. Looking forward to trying it out
By the way since it was shown:
An option to hide colliders in that mode would be nice, that usually takes a lot of performance and is redundant. Also takes away from the visuals.
I would like to argue that graph is somewhat more logical and more flexible than layers and mask. Shader Graph is not enough. I want to control the logic of generation directly
Some feature of unreal PCG I see and want it to be include in unity worldbuilding such as, if there is something, it has more chance to generate another thing. It can make more complex intention become possible in procedural generation. Include infinite terrain or random map. It can generate sensible ecosystem such as vegetation species on each elevation ranges of the random terrain with the graph that can be reuse
Please consider graph system in world building since now unity has advance graph tool foundation using in animation too
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ECS is not necessary to increase default terrain performance exponentially. Please prioritize the most important and most easily tackled objectives first. Outside of that, this is a lot to digest. Don’t discount modular improvements on the shoulders of giants.